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“I ask you again,” shouted Zilkovsky. “Do you recant?”

Golitsin said nothing.

“For the sake of your soul, that it may fly to Zentrum and seek forgiveness and not be relegated to the realm of the thrice-damned of the Outer Dark forever, I ask you for the final time: do you recant, heretic?”

Golitsin gazed down at the prelate. A tender expression came over his face. “I recant,” he said. He raised his head and shouted to the crowd. “I recant all! Zentrum forgive me! I recant! Alaha Zentrum! I recant!”

“Very well,” Zilkovsky said. “May Zentrum have mercy upon your soul.”

The prelate signaled to the guards, then turned his back. He quickly walked away, back down the path that had been cleared through the crowd, the train of his heavy priestly garment dragging through the dust behind him, obliterating his footprints, making it appear, to Abel’s Scout’s eye, as if no man had walked this path at all. Or at least, a man who did not wish to be found out.

Then the crackle of the fire as the torches caught at the kindling caught Abel’s attention, and he turned back. The fire grew away from the spots the torches had been laid, and soon the entire base of the bonfire took on the red crackle of flames, visible now even in direct sunlight.

Abel watched. Minutes passed. The fire grew unquenchable.

The stocks of the muskets began to blacken.

The crowd gasped and stifled screams when two of the rifles went off.

Someone neglected to clear those chambers, Abel thought. It wasn’t surprising, considering that most of the Regulars had no idea how the breechloaders operated

Finally, Abel could stand it no longer, and looked up at the staked man.

Golitsin had picked him out in the crowd and was staring straight down at him.

Golitsin smiled when he saw Abel was looking at him. He called out over the fires. “At least we had The Boat on the Water, didn’t we Dashian?”

Abel nodded. “Damn right!” he called out.

“Thrice-damned right,” said Golitsin. “One, two, three. Thrice! And the last one was the prettiest of them all. I tell you she was like water hyacinth and lavender. She was-”

He screamed. The fire had truly reached him now. Their smoke rose, and Abel could barely see his face through the clouds of it. The rifle stocks were beginning to catch now, their dense wood finally giving in to the inevitable flames. Tongues of fire curled around their edges and the oil finish crinkled and blackened.

It was to be as if they, and Golitsin, had never existed.

A shot rang out. It was extreme long range and seemed only another pop, maybe a little louder than most, to add to those emanating from the bonfire. Most present probably thought it was. But in the next instant, the smoke cleared and Abel saw what he’d hoped to see.

A clean hit.

Golitsin had taken the shot in the left eye. A piece of his face had also been blown off from the eye’s boney orbit outward to the ear. Golitsin’s chin instantly slumped down to his chest. He was dead.

Kruso, thought Abel. Best shot in Treville. Maybe in the Land itself.

He’d ordered Kruso to find a spot-likely the roof of the nishterlaub warehouse, for it offered both cover and a good vantage point-and wait until the smoke obscured the priest enough so that those watching wouldn’t be able to tell a bullet had ended his life and not the flames. There were also other Scouts posted about in vantage point, in case Kruso’s shot had missed.

Joab would guess. Probably Zilkovsky. Or maybe they would believe, along with the rest of the crowd, that the shot was merely one of the heretic’s own accursed creations firing, exploding in the last throes of its burning, killing its creator even as it darkened in its own incineration.

The heretic was dead.

The guns were destroyed.

Stasis was served.

Everything could go back to the way it was before. The way it had always been and always would be.

Zentrum was satisfied.

3

She met him in Garangipore on the evening before he was scheduled to board the barge for Lindron. It was the apartment of a servant, near the Jacobson compound in Garangipore. The girl had cleared out at Mahaut’s request and given them the evening in the cramped but comfortable quarters. Most importantly, it was an apartment with a backdoor that opened onto an alley.

Even as he counted the alley entrances as instructed in her note, and entered through it, Abel had thought, This is not the last time I’ll be sneaking around through back alleys to see her, I’ll wager.

She was not in battledress, to say the least. In fact, there was little about her that might have betrayed that this was the woman whom all of Treville was beginning to refer to as “the Rocketeer.”

Mahaut had escaped her own charges of heresy when Golitsin had spontaneously confessed that he had conceived and manufactured the rockets, too. As they had proved less than effective as killers of men (although quite effective as terror to donts), the remaining stockpile, of which there were quite a few, had not been destroyed, but put into the charge of the Regulars, who were now free to adopt the weapon should they like.

And, knowing Joab’s penchant for using any advantage against the Blaskoye to the utmost, Abel imagined they would like the prospect.

He wasn’t so sure about the Women’s Auxiliary. Joab was still opposed to its continued existence, although he had acknowledged, and even praised, its effectiveness in the Battle of the Canal.

“Let me worry about that,” Mahaut had told him. “Your father is stubborn, but not unreasonable. He also knows I am beginning to win a substantial block of Jacobson goodwill to my side, and he needs that to pit against the Hornburgs of the world. I’m actually getting to have more power than I ever expected within the household.” She laughed. “It seems nobody much liked Edgar all along. They feel sorry for me. And I let them.”

Abel kissed her then. “I don’t feel sorry for you,” he said.

They fell together into the servant girl’s bed and made love in a tangle of linen blankets.

When it was over, they sat together, and by the light of an oil lamp, Abel traced a finger in a circle along Mahaut’s scar, her breasts, and her shoulders, her tan lines beginning to reassert themselves after they’d disappeared during her recuperation.

No battledress tonight, but here is its shadow, he thought.

“I have something for you,” she said. “It’s in the other room waiting. He wasn’t going to give it back, but I ‘acquired’ it from his valet with a bit of blackmail. An agreement to keep quiet about some gossip I knew about the man and a town whore. Very cheaply purchased, actually.”

“My pistol?” he asked.

Mahaut nodded.

“Take it with you to Lindron,” she said. “I hear there are certain sectors of that place you do not want to go unarmed.”

“Thanks,” he replied.

“Do you still have my dagger?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered. Then, after a pause. “Can I keep it?”

“Of course.”

“I killed him with it. Rostov.”

“You told me,” she said. She rose up and put her arms around him. The chill of her black onyx bracelet where it touched the back of his neck sent shivers down his spine. Her skin bore the faint odor of hyacinth, her perfume. The servant girl was lucky. It was bound to linger in her sheets for days.

She kissed him, then drew him down to her and whispered in his ear. “Tell me again.”

Epilogue: The Guardian

My Dear Son,

I am sorry that I have not written you in some time. However, my duties in holding the district safe from further incursion have taken me away from my desk more often than I would have liked. The Scouts are holding the Escarpment fairly well, but the Blaskoye are engaged in an enormous rebuilding effort that, I am afraid, is bearing fruit. Even after their ignominious defeat three years ago at our hands, they have not given up on their quest to dominate the Land, or to use this district as a gateway. The Scouts bring the word of a new leader who is arisen. There are strange reports, for it seems that this leader may not be a warrior himself, but a sort of politician among the tribes. To tell the truth, I fear this sort of leader far more than I did the one who pitted himself against us before.